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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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@Kiba, @Roomba, @others:

A quick meta note: I tend to find it annoying when we reject general ideas about sealing early in the brainstorming process.

Take the whole "Rechargable seals are probably super hard" thing.

We don't actually know that yet and we have incredibly cheap tests, in the form of asking Kagome or Jiraiya their thoughts, that actually allow us to get in-game evidence for or against that hypothesis.

For sealing research specifically, the thread finds reasons that things might not work and forgets/forgoes actually asking. It's a problem for a few reasons.

First is that it promotes the idea that we know what sealing can and cannot do, when a lot of that built up 'knowledge' is just thread conjecture based on highly limited canon information. We can replace the conjecture with canon estimates from experts (at minimal costs) and yet we keep shooting ideas down too early.

Next, this pattern of discussion means that most people in the thread pick up a specific model of sealing that is probably wrong in many of the specifics. Even worse, other players get the impression this model of sealing is canon and then reinforce it. Over time this means that unverified ideas like "all seals expire", become part of implicit accepted truth.1​

Finally, it makes brainstorming much less fun, at least for me, since I just get to expect any idea will be vetoed as "too hard/impossible" before we do any substantive filtering (i.e. getting a canon estimate from an expert). I suspect I'm not the only one who actively enjoys fleshing out ideas, and an immediate response of "____ is too hard" asserted as if it's a known fact makes the process less fun.

Ideally, we should strive to point out the implicit assumptions in an idea without explicitly rejecting it, unless there is explicit canon evidence. Say "Hmm, that assumes there won't be issues with the lifetime of the seals. If there are ... " instead of "The seals won't last long enough to be useful.".

Admittedly there is a spectrum of actual responses between the two examples I gave, but I'd like the thread to err towards the nicer side of the spectrum when we discuss sealing. Sealing is a lot more ambiguous than our tone tends to imply.

1: I've got actual thoughts about the specific question of seal lifetime, but that's not the point of this post. I'll make another one with those thoughts in a bit.
 
Velorien said:
The roles Hazō already knew are included in the 100. But note that the 100 includes the non-STL Leaf teams. It's up to you whether you want to vote for them too.
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eaglejarl said:
Here you go. Full scoring rules are in the 'Informational' threadmarks tab.





EDIT: Fixed the last quote to account for the latest update.
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Thanks so much guys!
Cariyaga said:
We should also point out to STL that they can make a significant amount of points by outing each other and their exact identities.
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Lets do exactly as Shika suggested and give the other (non STL) Leaf teams the new information he bestowed to us (note the wording there.)

Ask for no explicit information in return, but do ask them if they can help us find our paired individual.

We will of course give Team Clanless access to all of our information up until this point, since their only useful member was instrumental in helping us disqualify a quarter of the opposition.
Cariyaga said:
So, things we need to do:

Target Urahara the Fur Trader (Has the Blood Release bloodline and has each of our scents from the Stone Cold Killers incident)
Get our Secret Role partners
Take advantage of chaos
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I'm not sure exactly what we can do to deal with Urahara but we can brainstorm.

I think we should avoid table flipping for the rest of the event unless it's within the rules. The proctors will be on high alert and at least one has our number and we're on speed dial in case anything fucked happens.

I would go as far as to suggest we take countermeasures for being DQed by some fucked up plot. Just in case.
 
Cariyaga said:
Have Akane bait him into the hedge maze for a Team Uplift ambush?
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No.

If we try to get at him we need to do so through a patsy. If we just ambush him we're liable to get thrown out and lose everything we would've gained for this event.


Also Akane is probably ready to punch us.
 
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Jello_Raptor said:
1: I've got actual thoughts about the specific question of seal lifetime, but that's not the point of this post. I'll make another one with those thoughts in a bit.
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We have lots of weak and contradictory evidence about how seal lifetime and chakra usage work. There's seals like the lock on Keiko's summoning scroll that have lasted for hundreds of years, and stuff like the Skywalkers that just last for 15-20 minutes. Things like skytowers last for days?​, and Naruto's jinchuriiki seal has to manipulate/transfuse chakra somehow (At least if it's it's a seal that does the job in MfD). Explosive seals cost a negligible about of chakra to infuse, and produce enough energy to keep a speaker running for years1​.

We were told early on that sealing is technically capable of anything, and what actually matters is how difficult something we want to do is.

Annoyingly, some of our best evidence for how sealing works is now non-canon. Hazou's rant about the problems with the original night-light seals gave us a lot of insight into how power management and constructions of seals work. But we can't take that as given anymore.

There are so many models for how energy usage and triggering in seals could work that it really doesn't make much sense to argue before we ask an expert in story.
  • Seals might die because they degrade over time, and for reasons unconnected with the amount of chakra they store or the amount of energy they use.
  • Seals might have a fixed store of chakra to burn, but we still know little about how that corresponds to the physical effects they create.
    • There's little reason to believe that our physics-based notion of energy has anything to do with it, otherwise the same negligible bit of chakra that can produce the banshee seal's long lasting(a few hours or so?)​, very high power wail would power a light that lasts practically forever.
  • Seals might be charged when they're triggered, allowing the user to modulate lifetime at cast time. Timer seals/components would just leak chakra until it hits a trigger level.
  • Seal lifetime could be based on how well they self-repair damage when they connect to the Out. So that each use of the Out to produce an effect would degrade the structure of the seal. Simpler seals could be more robust to this damage, while sufficiently complex seals could use a self-repair mechanism to last long.
  • Long lived seals, like the casino seals, need to be 'awake' enough to detect changes to the environment and that may or may not take 'power' in addition to the 'power' used to produce light or sound.
    • If they do, then there is still probably some notion of a lifetime involved, and one we can optimize for.
    • If they're not, actively using 'power' during passive detection, then that opens up a whole bunch of really interesting tricks.
  • Chakra itself might be a problem for seal lifetime, making something like the rocket equation kick in and act like a practical limiter.
    • Possibly:
      • Holding more chakra makes the seal degrade faster, meaning you have to do more to compensate for that degradation.
      • Any chakra storage might need to spend chakra as 'fuel' for 'containment' processes, with the 'fuel' needed growing based on the amount of chakra 'contained'.
      • Chakra held in seals might have a half life, slowly dissapearing over time.
    • Either way there'd be a dynamic of rapidly diminishing returns as you try to store more 'power'
  • The ChakrAI might randomly choose a lifetime for each specific seal, and the only way to optimize power is to try a pile of functionally identical designs until you find one that rolled well.
  • A wizard might be doing it.
It's not even reasonable to try to get the QMs to pin down one of these models as true since there will always be caveats and exceptions. At best we might get them to say "that model is a semi-decent approximation" or "it works kinda like that most of the time". Anything more definitive ties their hands too much as they try to make the world look consistent while they write its history on-demand.

Ultimately, I think we don't really know, and since we're not getting a textbook on sealing out of the QMs we need to be asking more small questions about sealing that they can feasibly answer.

On the object level question---about the extrasensory seals---I think the strongest argument I have is to point to banshee seals as things which produce much louder sound than we need for quite a while.

?: Anything with the question mark superscript is something I'm unsure about and comes from memory. (@faflec? As thread loremaster, mind chiming in when you notice a mistake?)

1: An exaggeration for the explosive seals we tend to use, but valid for larger ones.
 
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So, question @eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail

Does Hazou have enough in-character knowledge to make the assumption of why Urahara the Fur Trader (user of the Blood Release bloodline, from Hot Springs) is after Akane (participated in the Stone Cold Killers incident)? If so, we may wish to let Jiraiya in on this ASAP.
 
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I think we should focus on not getting disqualified after this point.

We have already gotten enough points from the table flip to get us to the first place. Now protecting those points should be top priority instead of going after more points.
 
Cariyaga said:
So, question @eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail

Does Hazou have enough in-character knowledge to make the assumption of why Urahara the Fur Trader (user of the Blood Release bloodline, from Hot Springs) is after Akane (participated in the Stone Cold Killers incident)? If so, we may wish to let Jiraiya in on this ASAP.
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What you just said is exactly the sum of Hazō's knowledge. That and the fact that the Kotsuzui Clan is famous for its hunter-nin. Strictly speaking, Hazō doesn't even know what the Blood Element does.
 
Jello_Raptor said:
Things like skytowers last for days?,
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30 days, yes.

Jello_Raptor said:
It's not even reasonable to try to get the QMs to pin down one of these models as true since there will always be caveats and exceptions. At best we might get them to say "that model is a semi-decent approximation" or "it works kinda like that most of the time". Anything more definitive ties their hands too much as they try to make the world look consistent while they write its history on-demand.

Ultimately, I think we don't really know, and since we're not getting a textbook on sealing out of the QMs we need to be asking more small questions about sealing that they can feasibly answer.
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Jello_Raptor said:
@Kiba, @Roomba, @others:

A quick meta note: I tend to find it annoying when we reject general ideas about sealing early in the brainstorming process.

Take the whole "Rechargable seals are probably super hard" thing.

We don't actually know that yet and we have incredibly cheap tests, in the form of asking Kagome or Jiraiya their thoughts, that actually allow us to get in-game evidence for or against that hypothesis.

For sealing research specifically, the thread finds reasons that things might not work and forgets/forgoes actually asking. It's a problem for a few reasons.

First is that it promotes the idea that we know what sealing can and cannot do, when a lot of that built up 'knowledge' is just thread conjecture based on highly limited canon information. We can replace the conjecture with canon estimates from experts (at minimal costs) and yet we keep shooting ideas down too early.

Next, this pattern of discussion means that most people in the thread pick up a specific model of sealing that is probably wrong in many of the specifics. Even worse, other players get the impression this model of sealing is canon and then reinforce it. Over time this means that unverified ideas like "all seals expire", become part of implicit accepted truth.1

Finally, it makes brainstorming much less fun, at least for me, since I just get to expect any idea will be vetoed as "too hard/impossible" before we do any substantive filtering (i.e. getting a canon estimate from an expert). I suspect I'm not the only one who actively enjoys fleshing out ideas, and an immediate response of "____ is too hard" asserted as if it's a known fact makes the process less fun.

Ideally, we should strive to point out the implicit assumptions in an idea without explicitly rejecting it, unless there is explicit canon evidence. Say "Hmm, that assumes there won't be issues with the lifetime of the seals. If there are ... " instead of "The seals won't last long enough to be useful.".

Admittedly there is a spectrum of actual responses between the two examples I gave, but I'd like the thread to err towards the nicer side of the spectrum when we discuss sealing. Sealing is a lot more ambiguous than our tone tends to imply.

1: I've got actual thoughts about the specific question of seal lifetime, but that's not the point of this post. I'll make another one with those thoughts in a bit.
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I'm sorry if my posts came off as an attempt to shoot down ideas prematurely; that wasn't my intent. As a matter of fact, your extrasensory seal proposal was solid and realistic enough that I basically took that as a given and started looking for marginal failure modes. Like I said, I'm very in favour of dedicating Hazou's research time to this, maybe even before the tournament (it's somewhat challenging to do this in Mist for opsec reasons).

On the more speculative "rechargable seals" idea, I agree that we don't know anything concrete, and you won't see me argue against asking Kagome or Jiraiya about this, or any other related topic (though I can see the QMs reach for their aspirin bottles at the prospect in my mind's eye). Still, this is supposed to be a rational world, and the rule-of-thumb of "Would anyone else have researched this, if it wasn't very hard?" applies. That doesn't mean we can't do it; just means that we should be ready for Kagome and Jiraiya to tell us it's impossible and not to waste time on it.

But yeah, all in all, I'm all for checking these things with the leading authorities before dismissing them outright.
 
It is a good idea to have members of STL or our own team make inquiries about whether our identity had been disseminated to bunches of other competitors. Offering information trades, ect, to see if our name/identity/role is in circulation among the other Genin. If plenty of other ninja have our identity correct, then we can assume that we were (before this latest gambit) pretty deep in the negatives. If a relatively small amount of other ninja have our identity correct then we can assume that we might have been in the positives even before the latest gambit.

It is fairly important to have an idea of how deep a point hole we're trying to dig ourselves out of, and the progress we might have made climbing ourselves out of that hole.

In the second scenario we should have a few hundred points right now. So we should focus on playing it relatively safe and circumspectly releasing info we have on top non-leaf teams for free, maybe including a small list of randomly selected other roles (ones that we identified ourselves prior to sharing info with STL, so that STL doesn't get mad at us for sharing previously private info and reducing STL's relative advantage) as a sort of validation mechanism. Weed out the real competition and maintain our high point total. Not quite so sure what to do in the first scenario, but releasing the info of other top teams seems like it'd still be smart.
Adhoc vote count started by 18scsc on Jun 28, 2018 at 3:58 PM, finished with 2447 posts and 26 votes.
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Back when i was involved in these conversations, sealing was pictograph programming. Is it still like that?
 
Spector29 said:
Back when i was involved in these conversations, sealing was pictograph programming. Is it still like that?
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Kinda. Imagine programming where everyone's working at the assembly level, no one's compilers are compatible with anyone else's, and every line of code is inherently tied to every other line of code in a giant tangled mess.

A lot of the stuff that makes programming easier, like high-level languages, try-catches, object-oriented programming, even copy-pasting code flat-out isn't possible in sealing, so sealmasters are stuck writing each program from scratch with the risk that a single slip-up can send the whole program into utter madness.
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
Kinda. Imagine programming where everyone's working at the assembly level, no one's compilers are compatible with anyone else's, and every line of code is inherently tied to every other line of code in a giant tangled mess.

A lot of the stuff that makes programming easier, like high-level languages, try-catches, object-oriented programming, even copy-pasting code flat-out isn't possible in sealing, so sealmasters are stuck writing each program from scratch with the risk that a single slip-up can send the whole program into utter madness.
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Ahh, but code is something I can work with.

Now that I'm in a position to immerse myself back into the quest, is there a sealing doc I could/should catch up on? (Or a Discord?)
 
Velorien said:
After some discussion, the teams agreed to a limited trade. Shikamaru filled in the blanks on all the teams from the Oyabun's dossier, plus Team Downfall (he rolled his eyes at the name) and a few others he speculated to be top teams. He already knew everything your team knew due to earlier trades, but offered a total of 100 roles. They include the ones known to you, and probably others you will soon hear due to the disaster outside. They also include all the other Leaf teams, with whom he encouraged you to share the list in the name of greater Leaf dominance.
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@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail Did we get information regarding secret roles from these ninjas?
 
Spector29 said:
Ahh, but code is something I can work with.

Now that I'm in a position to immerse myself back into the quest, is there a sealing doc I could/should catch up on? (Or a Discord?)
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The seals that have mechanical rules attached can be found in this quest's rules doc, one of our members has compiled a sealing tech tree (because seals get easier if you know similar seals, so to get the best and fanciest seals we need to start small), and we have a general-use discord channel.
 
So, does anyone wanna start a plan? I'm disinclined to do so this time, but on the plus side, we're incentivized by eaglejarl to keep the plan small: 199 words or less means +5 XP.
 
Icehawk78 said:
[X] Plan privately apologize to Akane and then win event

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[X] Plan Repeat The Stuff From The Last Plan That We Didn't Do Yet But Also Search For Our Countepart Stealthily And Also Apologize Privately To Akane

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Adhoc vote count started by faflec on Jun 28, 2018 at 4:46 PM, finished with 79 posts and 2 votes.
  • [X] Plan privately apologize to Akane and then win event
    [X] Plan Repeat The Stuff From The Last Plan That We Didn't Do Yet But Also Search For Our Countepart Stealthily And Also Apologize Privately To Akane
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